Comment: Case for a permanent UN peace keeping force. (1993, 20 Marks)
The Charter’s own answer to the problem of force was Article 43: special agreements placing national contingents at the Security Council’s disposal under a Military Staff Committee of the permanent five. Talks collapsed in 1947 over size, basing and command, so every UN mission since has been assembled from borrowed national units. The case for a permanent force is therefore a case for completing the Charter: strong in principle, politically stalled for eighty years.
A continuous line of proposals
- Trygve Lie’s UN Guard Force (1948): a few thousand recruits for guard and observation duties, rejected as the germ of a UN army; only the Field Service survived.
- Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s peace-enforcement units in An Agenda for Peace (1992): heavily armed national formations on call to restore ceasefires; none was created.
- Brian Urquhart’s volunteer force (1993): about 5,000 individually recruited volunteers serving the UN directly, deployable within days of a mandate.
- SHIRBRIG (1996–2009): a Danish-led standby brigade that served in Ethiopia–Eritrea and Sudan, then disbanded as members were drawn into Afghanistan and Iraq.
- The Brahimi Report (2000): Lakhdar Brahimi‘s panel judged a standing army unrealistic and asked instead for brigade-size national forces deployable within 30 to 90 days, a target never met. Robert C. Johansen and civil-society advocates revived a standing force in 2006 as a UN Emergency Peace Service.
- The Peacekeeping Capability Readiness System (2015): a register of pledged national units at graded readiness, a database of promises rather than a force.
The case for
- Speed. Most of the 800,000 Rwandan victims died within six weeks in 1994. Force commander Roméo Dallaire held that a modest, well-equipped force could have stopped the killing, and a 1998 Carnegie Commission study supported him. Pledged forces arrive in months; the delay was the disaster.
- Independence. A UN-recruited force takes UN orders. Seconded contingents carry national caveats and can be withdrawn when opinion at home turns, as Belgium withdrew from Rwanda in April 1994 after ten of its soldiers died.
- Professionalism and conduct. One doctrine, training standard and discipline would replace units of very unequal capability.
- Credibility. A ready force would give deterrence and civilian protection real backing and strengthen the Secretary-General’s preventive diplomacy.
The case against
- Cost. A standing force must be paid whether deployed or not. A cash crisis driven by arrears already sent a quarter of uniformed peacekeepers home in 2025.
- Command. If the Council directs it, the force is only as usable as the veto allows and the speed advantage disappears; if the Secretary-General does, an unelected official commits force, which no great power will accept.
- Sovereignty from both sides. Great powers reject a supranational instrument they do not control, as Hans J. Morgenthau‘s realism predicts. Much of the Global South fears it would be used against weak states and never against strong ones.
- Blurring the categories. A standing force under its own command is an enforcement instrument; it would collapse peacekeeping’s consent-based character into collective security. India, third-largest contributor in 2026 with nearly 300,000 personnel sent over the decades, presses this objection and wants contributors consulted under Article 44.
- Loyalty and law. Whose law governs a UN soldier, and where does the force go between emergencies?
Conclusion
The case is morally strongest and politically weakest. States with money and airlift do not want a permanent force; those that want it cannot pay. The realistic path runs through rapid-deployment pledges, regional standby forces such as the African Standby Force, and UN-funded African Union operations under resolution 2719 (2023). A true standing force will remain the Charter’s unfinished business until the great powers accept limits on their own discretion.